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The CloudBook is the new house toy for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
loosecanon. In the Ultra Mobile PC niche, it is definitely the red headed step child. Getting little press, questionable releases, and strangely lukewarm treatment from Walmart, the supposed major distributor of the thing. In contrast to Asus, whose offering has more buzz than a bee hive on Columbian special blend.
Some critiques of the CloudBook have been bizarre. People just don't seem to understand the thing. It would be more understandable if it weren't for the hype around the Asus eee and other such products. Again, there's almost this lethargic anti hype around it, as if it was a horrid movie that everyone signed on to produce but no one wants to be attached to when it flops. This would make sense if it were a Zune or something, but so far it's more than met expectations.
The CloudBook is small and runs quite a while on a single charge. The keyboard is cramped, but not overly so. The mouse is curious, with a touch pad in the upper right and the buttons in the upper left. After a bit of play, holding the thing in both hands and using thumbs, the mouse control is kind of fun. It has two USB ports, Ethernet jack, built in wifi, and one port they tell me is a 4-in-1 media bus.
It ain't fast and a web page with too much junk will give it pause. It takes a while to boot up. If you run a resource hog, like OpenOffice.org Write, give it some time to get all the pieces up. With only 512MB of RAM and a dinky 1.2GHz VIA processor, it's really does surprisingly well.
One consistent stumbling block for most; it's not Windows! The OS, an odd beast called gOS, is an Ubuntu Linux derivative with a Google centric slant. I don't much care for the cutesy Mac like doc bar. As a linux geek, I have some issues with the distro, but I suspect I'm atypical in that. ( e.g. apt-get is broke for many packages in ubuntu repositories )
The OS is interesting. I read an interview with the creator ( cobbler ) in some linux rag recently. It's a nice idea. But as it stands, there's a lot of ugly to be found if you peek behind the user friendly facade. I think the CloudBook would run better on a standard ubuntu distro, selectively trimmed for the device.
I have only a couple of reasonable problems with the CloudBook. The most annoying is poor sizing. The working area 800x600 but some primary functions have dialogs far larger than that. There is a key mouse combo solute you can use to move over sized screen elements around, but it's not real apparent when you first need to use it. A little pointing of the user in the right direction would go a long way for this.
The other problem is lack of media. There is no readily supplied method to restore the thing to factory new if it goes belly up. The OS version that it came with is not the same as the one available from the gOS site and Everex has no downloads for it except Windows drivers!
I may include a how to backup your CloudBook guide at some point, but I'm fear it's a very limited audience. Overall, it seems an excellent tool and really a bargain price for what it does. I could say more, but I'd have to get it away fromloosecanon first.
loosecanon. In the Ultra Mobile PC niche, it is definitely the red headed step child. Getting little press, questionable releases, and strangely lukewarm treatment from Walmart, the supposed major distributor of the thing. In contrast to Asus, whose offering has more buzz than a bee hive on Columbian special blend. Some critiques of the CloudBook have been bizarre. People just don't seem to understand the thing. It would be more understandable if it weren't for the hype around the Asus eee and other such products. Again, there's almost this lethargic anti hype around it, as if it was a horrid movie that everyone signed on to produce but no one wants to be attached to when it flops. This would make sense if it were a Zune or something, but so far it's more than met expectations.
The CloudBook is small and runs quite a while on a single charge. The keyboard is cramped, but not overly so. The mouse is curious, with a touch pad in the upper right and the buttons in the upper left. After a bit of play, holding the thing in both hands and using thumbs, the mouse control is kind of fun. It has two USB ports, Ethernet jack, built in wifi, and one port they tell me is a 4-in-1 media bus.
It ain't fast and a web page with too much junk will give it pause. It takes a while to boot up. If you run a resource hog, like OpenOffice.org Write, give it some time to get all the pieces up. With only 512MB of RAM and a dinky 1.2GHz VIA processor, it's really does surprisingly well.
One consistent stumbling block for most; it's not Windows! The OS, an odd beast called gOS, is an Ubuntu Linux derivative with a Google centric slant. I don't much care for the cutesy Mac like doc bar. As a linux geek, I have some issues with the distro, but I suspect I'm atypical in that. ( e.g. apt-get is broke for many packages in ubuntu repositories )
The OS is interesting. I read an interview with the creator ( cobbler ) in some linux rag recently. It's a nice idea. But as it stands, there's a lot of ugly to be found if you peek behind the user friendly facade. I think the CloudBook would run better on a standard ubuntu distro, selectively trimmed for the device.
I have only a couple of reasonable problems with the CloudBook. The most annoying is poor sizing. The working area 800x600 but some primary functions have dialogs far larger than that. There is a key mouse combo solute you can use to move over sized screen elements around, but it's not real apparent when you first need to use it. A little pointing of the user in the right direction would go a long way for this.
The other problem is lack of media. There is no readily supplied method to restore the thing to factory new if it goes belly up. The OS version that it came with is not the same as the one available from the gOS site and Everex has no downloads for it except Windows drivers!
I may include a how to backup your CloudBook guide at some point, but I'm fear it's a very limited audience. Overall, it seems an excellent tool and really a bargain price for what it does. I could say more, but I'd have to get it away from
loosecanon first.
